Pork is not kosher

Jews affirm that the pig is not kosher and may not be eaten. The Torah gives two signs for a permitted land animal, a fully split hoof and the chewing of the cud (Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14), and requires both. The pig has a split hoof but does not chew the cud, and is named explicitly among the forbidden creatures; because it displays one sign but not the other it became, in later Jewish thought, the very emblem of something that appears clean on the outside while failing the test within.

Jewish tradition has long debated whether the pig prohibition needs, or should be given, a reason at all. Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, proposed a hygienic rationale, arguing that pigs were kept in unclean conditions in the ancient world and that their flesh was harmful to health, a position later medical and dietary developments have made harder to sustain as a literal argument. Other authorities classify the law instead as a chok, a statute without a disclosed rational basis, grouped with the other kashrut rules as commandments whose purpose is obedience itself rather than a discoverable practical benefit, a distinction rabbinic tradition draws throughout its treatment of ritual law.

The dietary laws (kashrut) are presented in the Torah not as hygiene but as a discipline of holiness that sets Israel apart, and observant Jews keep them as an expression of the covenant regardless of any practical rationale. The prohibition is held across the observant denominations, and refusal of pork became historically a badge of Jewish fidelity under persecution. It parallels the independent Islamic prohibition of swine, though the two traditions ground the rule in separate revelations and Jewish law derives it from the general test of hoof and cud rather than naming the pig alone.

The prohibition's role as a marker of identity had severe historical consequences: during the Spanish Inquisition, the willingness to eat pork publicly became a test authorities used to judge whether conversos, Jews and their descendants who had converted to Catholicism, were sincere in their new faith or secretly continuing Jewish practice, and refusal or reluctance to eat pork was recorded as evidence of judaizing in inquisitorial proceedings; the same dynamic applied to Muslim converts, moriscos, under the same suspicion, making a dietary law into, at times, a literal matter of life and death rather than a purely religious observance.